What’s happening in Tonga is a microcosm of China’s expanding global influence and why the United States is losing ground fast.
August 2016 was a sun-swamped winter in the South Pacific and the vanilla business was bad.
Of course, I’d noticed the workers. Who hadn’t? Every day they hurtled down the waterfront road, piled in the bed of white Ute trucks. They were bound for the capital’s central business district where they were building a colossal edifice to house the Tongan government’s premier and all its ministers. The project had been a dream of the Kingdom’s late monarch George V, but the $11 million price of the St. George Palace, as it would be dubbed, was not coming out of the Kingdom’s coffers.
But underneath it all, the growing presence of the Chinese government in Tonga pumped tension into the life of the island nation that anyone could feel. This tension had started long before I arrived in 2014, the year the Chinese Communist Party’s brand-new leader Xi Jinping announced his “Asia-Pacific Dream” of cooperation and launched a tour of the South Pacific countries where he met with Tonga’s soon-to-be-crowned King George VI.
Women perform the traditional “Tau’olunga” at the Royal Agriculture Show in 2014. | Photo courtesy of Susannah Luthi Top: King Tupou VI of Tonga is crowned during the official coronation ceremony at the Free Wesleyan Church on July 4, 2015, in Nuku'alofa, Tonga. Tupou VI succeeds his brother, King Tupou V, who passed away in 2012. Bottom: A parade on the main street of Nuku'alofa celebrates the coronation on July 2. Traditional dancers perform in front of King Tupou VI as part of the entertainment at the Royal Luncheon.
where he had been locked out by a government cartel. He’d seen a lot of places, but he made Tonga sound particularly special—a generous place, a storybook kingdom. If you were hungry, you could drink a coconut or pick a fruit or catch a fish. I found carbon-copies of the typewritten letters he’d sent to a French botanist who spent his career in the tropics to perfect the art of vanilla curing. To him, my grandpa described the gentle life in Tonga in a poignant way.
The Chinese, on the other hand, meant business. You could say they burned their boats like Europeans of old who went to the New World, and then they hunkered down to start shops and enterprises none of the rest of us could live without. When they earned enough, they would bring family over, with an eye to moving on to New Zealand or Australia. They displaced Tongan operations and thatwouldn’t even attempt. They learned the Tongan language and, with a few high-profile exceptions, lived thriftily.
The West wants to know Beijing’s aims in the Pacific. However, my friend recently asked me, shouldn’t the West also be clear about what it wants? But these neighbors mess up. In 2006, neither New Zealand nor Australia stepped up with cash when Tongan rioters burned down Nuku’alofa in pro-democracy demonstrations that also targeted Chinese-owned businesses. It was Beijing that stepped up instead, making a loan that currently stands at about $108 million. Then the Chinese government sent in workers to rebuild the town.
“The Chinese will show up with the money and say, ‘Do you need a palace?’” said Tevita Motulalo, a Tongan journalist and geopolitical strategist at the Royal Oceania Institute in Tonga. I’ve crawled the newspapers and government missives, and peppered various people in Tonga with emails and messages trying to figure what the leaders think. The sense I have is one I started to feel when I lived there, that their own views are shifting from West to East. India is beginning to emerge as another power center in what New Zealand and the U.S. have started to call the Indo-Pacific region recently.
México Últimas Noticias, México Titulares
Similar News:También puedes leer noticias similares a ésta que hemos recopilado de otras fuentes de noticias.
China Delays Approval of BioNTech Covid-19 Shot to Preserve Confidence in Chinese VaccinesHealth authorities worry that public doubts about Chinese vaccines stemming from approval of BioNTech’s vaccine could disrupt plans to use the homegrown shots to reach their vaccination goal before the end of the year.
Leer más »
As China-Taiwan Tensions Rise, Japan Begins Preparing for Possible ConflictChina’s growing assertiveness toward Taiwan has triggering a public push by Japanese leaders to plan for a possible conflict, a shift that could lead to closer cooperation with the U.S. military
Leer más »
African swine fever is spreading rapidly in China, againAfrican swine fever is harmless to humans but deadly to the pigs that provide one of China’s most important sources of food
Leer más »
‘Free Guy’ Heading To No. 1 Weekend Spot In China As Hollywood Movies ReturnAfter a two-month blackout period in China for Hollywood movies, Disney/20th Century Studios’ Free Guy is looking to lead all pics in the country at the weekend B.O. with a $18M+, possibly $2…
Leer más »
Ryan Reynolds’ ‘Free Guy’ Tops $65M US, Nabs $5.4M Friday In China (Box Office)Ryan Reynolds’ 'Free Guy' is providing assurance that a theatrical window (for films people want to see) can help create something closer business-as-usual box office.
Leer más »
China protests US Navy, Coast Guard ships in Taiwan StraitBEIJING (AP) — China's defense ministry protested Saturday the passage of a U.S. Navy warship and Coast Guard cutter through the waters between China and Taiwan, a self-governing island claimed by China.
Leer más »